Monthly Archives: May 2017

Alien Breed 1-3, of which I can never seem to get beyond the first game, not because it’s bad, but because it’s slower-paced and more story-oriented with seemingly a lot of ground to cover, so I never finish it before getting distracted by another game.

And Alien Swarm, which came out as a free game on Steam some time in 2010. I -loved- that game in its heyday. It stressed an amazing amount of thinking person’s teamwork and strategy, between the different classes (officer, tech, heavy weapons guy, medic) and the friendly fire (please don’t) and the need to wait in locales for some machine to trigger (hoorah sentry guns) mixed with the need to be on the move or run out of ammo and be swarmed to death.

It was also pretty durned hard on its higher difficulties. I will never forget the spectacular Insane difficulty achievement run, which I somehow managed to PUG, with two Ukrainian guys who also really really wanted it, and a string of randoms as the last filler. We played the campaign mission multiple times over, at least a dozen, ever so increasingly refining our strategy more and more efficiently until final success. The three of us became a really well oiled team before the night was done.

It also took pretty much all the desire for teamwork out of me at that point, having hit the limit of what could be achieved (imo) in PUGs.

When Brutal difficulty came out (one step higher than Insane), I wussed right out – feeling ever so keenly that pang of wishing for three other friends in the same timezone, with the same level of skill in perfect lockstep with each other and desire to play the same games at the same time – and never went back to Alien Swarm.

To my surprise, checking it out today, I find out that a new updated Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop just launched this year in April 2017.

It has the same campaign and classes, with apparently added improvements.

Supposedly it supports up to 8 person multiplayer, though I haven’t tried that yet. (That sounds amazing, if hellishly chaotic with friendly fire *smirk*)

There’s a lot more campaigns than the basic Jacob’s Run that the first game came with.

And doubly amazingly, it also supports singleplayer with bots, with the ability to both give bots basic instructions, manually fire team-based skills with buttons, and hotswap from character to character to take over, while a bot helps out with the consciousness of the character you just left.

Imagine that. However you want to, or like to play, it gives you the option and the control. With tons of difficulty levels.

Free game.

Why more people aren’t playing it, I dunno.

Of course, the bots could stand a bit of improvement here and there…

I picked a random new campaign, selected some characters at random, and trundled through the map, mournfully realizing that I’ve forgotten entirely how to play this game and trying my best not to friendly fire the bots (who do not exactly make it easy with their erratic movements.)

We wind up at the climax of the mission. I’d picked up a chainsaw, and was gleefully taking up position on the stairs besides the Officer bot (Sarge), creating a lovely chokepoint with which to slaughter aliens.

Unfortunately, Sarge ran out of ammo, and decided the best thing he could do was wade into the fray and melee the aliens. Right in front of my chainsaw.

Which spinning constantly with my very held down mouse button.

I saw his hp plummet, not exactly sure if it was ME slicing him to bits, or the dozen aliens on him pummeling him back.

Reflexively, I let go, turning the chainsaw off, backing up in confusion, turning it back on, trying to surgeon slice aliens around but not into the absolute chaos…

I set up a bunch of buy orders for Tier 6 materials and the remaining orrian truffles last night.

When I next logged back in, everything was ready for the grand assemblage. Aka, clicking and dragging lots of materials out of hoarded storage, visiting some NPCs to buy one item or another with one currency or another, mystic forging some things and crafting some others with the correct alt that had 500 leatherworking or 500 huntsman.

That’s one shiny item icon.

I took it out for a spin.

Immediately, I was like, “Why has this NEVER come to my attention before?” “Why hasn’t anyone blown whistles and banged drums and made a immense furor to this world about this sweet sweet gun?”

You know what’s most striking about it?

Its SOUND.

(Disclaimer: Not my video. Pretty much the only one on Youtube that lets the rifle speak for itself without loads of commentary. And it’s amazing how many are dated from 2013-2015, with very few Predator videos after.)

It has a reverberating laser pew pew sound that at first seems a bit at odds with the looks of the sniper rifle, but sounds immensely epic in scope and befitting that of an item with legendary status.

The second awesome thing is the fiery projectile that comes out of the rifle. Besides looking awesome, it also lights mobs you shoot on fire, and they die with the special flaming death animation that the fiery dragon sword skin also produces.

In a way, it’s good that I didn’t realize this until -after- I made the legendary.

Because I’m not sure I would have been able to wait as long as I did, and would have spent a lot more money/effort chasing it.

All’s well that ends well. Everything got prioritized nicely, I’m now the happy owner of Rodgort, Kraitkin, a set of legendary heavy armor, and the Predator, and I feel like the tension of the last year or so with immensely long term goals hanging over my head has wound its way to a close.

I feel like I can close the book at the end of this GW2 chapter, so to speak, and just dabble or putter around with much shorter term goals that were being put off (e.g. various Living Story chievos, try to get into fractals -again-) and/or wander off to other games.

Sometime in the future, I intend to idly creep my way towards stuff like Astralaria, Chuka and Champawat, a set of legendary light armor and so on, but that is a long way off, so no need for any concrete plans as yet.

Plans are for the end stages, to kickstart myself into actually doing things (like put W, X, Y and Z into the mystic forge and click buttons, which I’d otherwise put off).

After this long fallow period of “I feel like I have nothing to say”, this is your forewarning that the next 35 days on this blog will be (hopefully) spammy, to the point of being annoying and necessitating your own version of filtering me out.

Today marks the start of something experimental on this blog, a switch up in format for a month or so, before we re-evaluate the state of things.

Bottom line is, I miss blogging and want to get back into the habit of posting.

As anyone who has tried blogging knows, this is HARD when you’ve fallen out of the habit, and doubly hard when you’re feeling blocked and uninspired.

To lower the barrier of entry, my demented brain has concocted The SAD Project – or rather, The Screenshot-A-Day Project.

(I am enjoying the deliberate irony of the abbreviation though, as I’m hoping for this intentionally “sad pathetic” daily effort to build up steam in my boiler once more.)

Let me set expectations straight – this is going to be an experimental “low effort threshold” format from May 29 to Jul 2.

Not every screenshot is going to be a gorgeous gratuitous landscape or carefully posed action shot. (Unless I feel like it.) Most are probably going to be full UI monstrosities from whatever game I happen to be playing that day.

There may or may not be captions to go along with the screenshot. (Given my tendency to verbosity, a “minimal captions” intention may wind up turning into a paragraph regardless.)

All post headings are likely to wind up titled with a lazy variant of The SAD Project – Day #. (Because trying to be too creative with a blog post title is a good way for me to not even start.)

I just miss the sensation of being able to track what game I’m currently playing over the passage of time.

I figure, a screenshot and short description will do that job just fine.

Second bird killed with one stone, I get back in the habit of clicking “New Post” on the blog.

Who knows, maybe we’ll get a bonus oratory or two along the way, once the muse gets re-inspired. It’ll be a journey of discovery. Who’s with me?

I am winding up on my second world completion with my favorite regions in Guild Wars 2, the autumnal Ascalonian plains.

World completion is a massive pain. Going from point to point filling in the landmark dots is a fairly boring too-Achiever-for-me-most-of-the-time grind, when all the Explorer in me wants to do is break free from its confines, race to the next horizon, hit a few harvesting nodes along the way, get diverted by a dynamic event and zig zag like a drunken worm across the map, while the “map completed percentage” remains stubbornly still and unmoving.

If you want a Gift of Exploration though, world completion is what you have to do.

And after putting it off for two years (in favor of first hoarding materials for a Legendary Armor set), I really -really- want my Predator legendary rifle.

I am supremely amused by this Hero Point challenge. This charr asks me a set of multiple choice questions about Almorra Soulkeeper.

I am gung-ho with all things charr, and I select the “let me skip all the buildup, OF COURSE I know all about General Soulkeeper, ask me your dang questions” second option without even quite realizing what I am in for.

Three questions in, I am starting to think I am getting in way over my head… “What -rank- was Almorra Soulkeeper when the incident happened? What exactly happened to her warband? What were they actually supposed to be doing when it happened?”

Uhhhh, I haven’t done this hero point in… oh… over three years?

I put in my best guess answers anyway, and ask the charr NPC how I did.